How your Realtor® can help you throughout the New Construction Process

Slate Real Estate
Slate Real Estate
Published on January 15, 2019

The Cole Slate Team has by pure accident become experts in New Construction real estate transactions over the last 5 years. We are passionate about representing our customers from initial inquiry through negotiations, contract signing, design center, pre-drywall walk with builder contractor, manages & is present for 3rd party inspections, home orientation walks, final walk, closing and even the 30-day & 11-month Warranty walks. New Construction Sales made up approx 49% of our business in 2018.

During the “Great Dark Period” of Real Estate during the BUST, Builders would cater to Realtors® hosting sales meetings, socials, offering bonuses for repeat business, drop off wine and cookies at our offices, etc. to entice us to bring ANY buyer in our pipeline to build new.  But, now that the market has rebounded, that has all changed. They don’t “need us” for our Buyers and are tightening guidelines on having representation.

This year we had a listing presentation for a customer who wanted to sell his existing home & build new in the same community. After handling the prep work for the listing portion of his transaction we contacted our trusted site agent with this particular builder to register our customer to us and inquiry on initial information to begin the Buying process. We were notified that he was “already registered” to another site agent. As the conversations unfolded the bullet points were:

  • Customer went into Sales Center to browse models
  • Admin at Sales Center made him “fill out his information” in order to go browse the models & registered him to the Sales Manager (who he had never met in person)
  • We reached out to the Sales Manager & VP of Sales for this builder to inquiry on how we could get our customer Registered to us to begin this process
  • VP NEVER responded to us, not even a reply (Our Team sold 9 homes in that community last year!)
  • Sales Manager responded to our customer several weeks later that it was “too late” to utilize his Realtor® (Customer had not even received general information on floorplans and lot availability)!

So, how do you keep this from happening if you or a friend or family are interested in building new? Call us FIRST, before you ever step foot into the sales center, even if it is to just “browse around”. Typically, we can call into our contacts and have you pre-registered to us, but with some builders we need to physically be present with you that 1st time you walk in.

We can’t stress enough how important it is to utilize a 3rd party Realtor®, who specializes in new construction, during a build process. We have overcome some major obstacles for our customers such as re-engineerings, fighting for 2 A/C units on a large 2 story home that tried to pass as 1, having a home moved on a lot to a more optimal position, requiring engineering certifications for broken trusses, requiring 3rd party mold inspections paid by Builder for moisture issues or mold growth on framing, negotiated rate buy-downs when construction was purposely delayed by Builder and interest rates shot up for buyer, and SO MUCH MORE!

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